Assignment:
Take notes (and bring them to class) commenting on what strikes you as interesting about the medical testimony of these individuals. How are they characterizing her? How do you account for the Times‘ portrayal of the defense? We will discuss this in class.

Week 6, Meeting 1

Topics:
Victorian Ladies and Hysterical Women
Cult of True Womanhood
The Pressures of a Modernizing World

In-class Activity:Discuss the Cult of Victorian Womanhood and the subsequent medicalization of women and their bodies.

Week 6, Meeting 2

Topics:
Women in the West
Women and Labor in a Western town

Readings:
C. Elizabeth Raymond, “I’m Afraid We Will Lose All We Have Made: Women’s Lives in a Nineteenth-Century Mining Town” in Comstock Women: The Making Of A Mining Community, pp 3-16.
Elizabeth Jameson, “Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, Women on the Western Frontier (1984), pp. 1-8.

Assignments:
Please write 200-300 words about how beliefs about women’s physical nature, moral superiority, or honor influenced how they were portrayed at trial. What anxieties or beliefs do you think these discussions illuminate? Use evidence from the trial to help support your argument.

Week 7, Meeting 1

Topics:
Intimate Homicide and the Unwritten Law of the Nineteenth Century
Changing Women’s roles in the 1870s and in the Cold War (discussion)

In-class Activity:Discuss the debate over the Unwritten Rule in the Nineteenth Century. Were women given leniency? Prepare to discuss your thoughts on whether certain women were given more latitude with their behavior. We’ll also discuss the role of women’s movements in the coverage of the trial.

Assignments:
Please take notes (and bring them to class) and reflect on how the Laura Fair case represents issues either of fear and anxiety or beliefs about the women’s movement in the nineteenth century. How does this movement reflect the changes in society?